Radical Enlightenment

Have you read Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House by Ken Goffman (a.k.a. R. U. Sirius)? Great fun in telling the story of the culturally verboten and politically incorrect! (For example, Goffman sees the insurrectionist Boston Tea Party as the epitome of playful outrageousness–the kind, however, that gets the American revolutionary spirit through to the political mind of the populace.)

While I liked Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, her Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism better celebrates the most cherished and legitimately historical Enlightenment tradition in the U.S. republic which has been challenged from the beginning by Counter-Enlightenment cultural “pushbacks” of various kinds–religiously/culturally antidemocratic (socially hierarchical) at base and narrowly opportunistic in their effects on social and economic development.

Last month over about a week’s time, I read Jonathan I. Israel’s (tome) Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752. First, it makes the case that revolutionary ideas in elites’ and peoples’ heads matter more than a mere marxian-like ripeness of socioeconomic dysfunctions in whether or not people act to overthrow ancien regimes and assume popular sovereignty. Also, Israel argues cogently that what actually is the contention between two Enlightenment traditions, one Radical, the other moderate–not their contention (as though they were seemingly one) against a persistent Counter-Enlightenment–is key to understanding modernity. Those who find their philosophical/moral roots in Spinoza and Bayle (monist radicals who welcome today’s “embodied” philosophers like Lakeoff and Rorty and the overwhelming majority of today’s neuroscientists) continue to contend with moderate dualists who find Leibniz, Newton, Locke, Voltaire, and others who are quite comfortable with Descartes’ accommodating split of the natural and the supernatural. Perhaps my favorite book on this contention between the radically and the moderately enlightened is Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. Stewart has written several great reads about modernity, but this one tops them all in cutting to the heart of what’s at issue in democratically re-forming our minds, moral direction, and political-cultural world. (Besides, it’s half about Baruch de Spinoza, whom I consider the most misunderstood, underestimated, and important thinker of all time. But then, that’s my opinion, not gospel.)

“evolutionary aesthetics”?

I just ordered Denis Dutton’s new book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. I read about it at my mind on books, a great blog to which I’ve been paying attention for a number of months due to my interest in cognitive science, complexity, and twenty-first century challenges to human sustainability.

conversion as a psychological process, not a religious destination

I’m reading Robert D. Richardson’s terrific intellectual biography William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. (Here’s a book review which appeared in the New York Times soon after the book was published two years ago.)

Richardson wrote this about James in the book’s Preface: “Nothing in our experience, for James, is really passive–not sleep, not hypnotic trance, not habit, not instinct, and least of all temperament. Active…does not mean orderly. Much of James’s best work is a protest not only against dualism but against what Ian Hacking calls ‘dynamic nominalism’; that is, our habit of creating and naming categories into which we then sort ourselves. Once ADHD had been described, suddenly we saw it in every other child. James’s strength of mind, his resistance to easy labeling, and his focus on experience itself rather than words for experience give his work its continuing explanatory power….James is famous for pragmatism (which he sometimes felt he should have called humanism), though he should be remembered for his radical empiricism (which could have been called phenomenology); that is, his belief that reality is confined to what we experience, with the crucial proviso that nothing we experience can be excluded.”

Jacques Barzun, who’s written about James’s influence on him in A Stroll With William James, sums up what I myself feel about James: “He is for me the most inclusive mind I can listen to, the most concrete and the least hampered by trifles.”

Here’s a YouTube video of Robert D. Richardson speaking briefly about “conversion,” an idea which most of us do not understand as William James did.

William James’s perspective about our always active and pragmatic minds which are inextricably embodied in our brains still wears well with today’s neuroscientific theorists and experimentalists.

the neuroscience of politics(?)

What follows below is a video presentation by neuroscientist George Lakoff about his recent book, The Political Mind. But Lakoff does more: he describes at greater length (about one hour) the findings of neuroscience about the embodied mind.